“I want to pay for that light before I go,” said McGuire, “and I owe this man an apology for striking him with it.”
“Huh,” grunted Dick.
“Don’t git silly,” said Jim.
Dick handed his lamp, which had a frosted stripe near the top of the globe, to McGuire, and picked up the bent and battered frame that awhile ago had fallen across his face.
“Don’t I quit?” asked McGuire, glancing from one face to the other.
“Quit! what do you quit fur? Didn’t you win? They don’t nobody quit—you simply change places; an’ when you lick me you’ll be yardmaster, an’ have two stripes on yer glim, see?”
McGuire could not reply. He was utterly unable to make these men out, and when Jones had climbed on to the engine, he stepped with the yardmaster on to the footboard, Dick, who was tired, took a seat on the bumper beam between them, and the little switcher trembled away down the track to where a freight conductor was swearing loudly in front of the switch-shanty.
When the road had been extended to Leadville young McGuire, having attracted the notice and won the respect of the Superintendent, was sent up to take charge of the yards. Switchmen were scarcer there than they had been at Pueblo, for the town was wild and wide open. Those who came to work in the yards were the toughest of the tough; men who could not find employment east of Denver came here to railroad, ten thousand feet above the sea. McGuire undertook to improve the service. He put up a bulletin that said men must not fight on duty, and that all switchmen would be expected to be sober when they reported for work; that trainmen would be allowed but one place of residence, and that the caller would not look further than the address given for men who were wanted.
“All switchmen,” said Flat-wheel Finigan, from the Texas Pacific, reading the bulletin. “Now, it’s plain to me that that ‘all’ means ‘Finigan,’” and the new bulletin was ripped ruthlessly from the wall of the yard-house.
If McGuire discharged a man, a worse one came to fill the vacancy; and the yardmaster became discouraged. He sent in his resignation, but no attention was paid to it. Nobody came to relieve him, and so he worked on, always short-handed and often alone. Winter came, and it was next to impossible to get men to handle the company’s business. A large force of laborers was kept constantly at work shovelling snow from the many spurs that ran up to the mines or down to the smelters. Of course McGuire could only offer schedule pay that was fixed at Denver, and it was hard to get men to switch in the snow for three dollars when they could have five for sawing wood or tending bar.